He glanced at Aiden. Then again, Aiden had been Cam’s best friend for just as long and Cam’s sister, Zoe, should have been like a sibling to Aiden too. She wasn’t. At all.
“I’ll never forget that first summer Josie had boobs,” Cam said thoughtfully, as if reminiscing about days gone by. “She was probably about fourteen. She came over to sunbathe with Zoe, and she walked through our kitchen in a bikini, and I dropped an open two-liter bottle of soda, and it sprayed all over everything.”
Grant ground his teeth.
Dax laughed. “How’d you explain that?”
Cam shook his head. “Josie was sweet and innocent. She had no idea that had anything to do with how she looked in that swimsuit.”
“So, of course, the question is,” Ollie said, glancing at Aiden, “if Josie had come to you at some point and asked you to be her first, what would you have said?”
Aiden rolled his eyes. “Fuck off.”
Zoe had done exactly that to Aiden just last Christmas. She’d been a twenty-five-year-old virgin, and she’d been ready to get her first time “over with”—her words to Aiden. She’d tried to seduce Aiden. And he’d turned her down.
Needless to say, when he’d come back to Appleby to tell her he was in love with her, he’d had a lot of work to do to win her over.
“Oh, I would have absolutely helped her out with that,” Cam said, completely seriously. “Once she was old enough, of course.”
Grant breathed in and out steadily. His friends were just fucking with him. He knew that.
“I still would help her out with that,” Cam went on. “I mean, I taught her to roller skate and how to play poker. And I gotta say, she’s really good at both now.”
“Enough.”
Grant’s response quieted the room, and his four best friends looked at him. But not with surprise. With aha expressions.
Grant rolled his eyes. Cam had been back with them for ten minutes, and he’d already joined right in with the bullshit without missing a beat.
Grant had resisted. He really had. But he wanted to punch someone in the face right now.
“But you really do need to let her sell these cupcakes,” Ollie said. “It’s a good idea. Maybe she could do, like, a liqueur filling. Make them very adult themed.”
“It’s not up to me to let her do anything,” Grant said. Which was true. He was feeling possessive of her—and the dirty, flirtatious cupcakes she’d made just for him—but he wasn’t about to tell her she couldn’t sell them. Hell, he should encourage it.
“Did you see them?” Dax asked Ollie. “The nipples on the boob cupcakes were hard candies. So you could suck on them.” He grinned. Then he looked at Grant. “Hey, was the clit a candy you could suck and lick too?”
“Shut the hell up, Dax,” Grant said.
“I’m being serious,” Dax said, sitting up straighter. “That’s creative and perfectly, hilariously dirty.”
Grant sighed. It was. “It was a hard candy,” he conceded. Then added, “Cherry flavored.”
Dax shook his head, looking a little awed. “Perfect. That sweet little lady has a naughty side. That’s amazing.”
It was. It was sexy as hell. And Grant was thinking about taking the rest of the day off and camping out at Buttered Up just so he could watch her bake again. Everything about her turned him on, and he couldn’t wait to see her again.
“The liqueur center of the pussy cupcake should definitely be cherry flavored,” Ollie said, nodding.
“But the pussy cupcake is cream filled,” Dax said. “Come on. We can’t mess with that.”
There was a beat, then Ollie and Dax said together, “Cherry-flavored cream.”
Grant groaned. This was how it so often went. Ollie could not shut his imagination off. He would let things just fall out of his mouth, Dax would pick them up and run with them, and Grant would blink, and everything would snowball.
Cam had swung his legs around and was leaning onto his thighs now. “Zoe and Josie are going to do this at the bakery?”
“It would have to be a side thing,” Aiden protested. “They couldn’t put those in the bakery cases.”
“Of course not,” Ollie said. “But they could easily let people know they were available and take orders without displaying them.”
Cam was nodding. “That would be hilarious.”
Aiden seemed unsure. “The nice little family-owned small-town bakery?”
“People who really knew my grandma knew she wasn’t always nice,” Cam said.
“I’m just saying, I’m not sure that’s on brand,” Aiden told him.